Many security vendors will not survive next few years

June 8, 2017

The wall of venture capital money being thrown at security currently means that users and channels will have to gamble on selecting a survivor to work with. Surveying the hundreds of vendors showing their wares at Infosec, Europe’s largest security show, Ian Kilpatrick, EVP Cyber Security for Nuvias (incorporating Wick Hill) says that he expects that fully a quarter of them will not be around in five years’ time.

The scale of VC backing is so high that new firms are springing up and offering very similar solutions, he says. And for the investors, it only takes one in ten of their investments to break through to scale for them to get a good return. The rest of the vendors will eventually be pushed out or absorbed.

For resellers as well as users, there are some tough decisions to be made. “We know what it is like because we are approached by dozens of new start-ups each month,” he says.

Looking around the halls at the London event, there are a few big names, but they are surrounded by small stands offering point solutions. Even the big names have relatively small shares of the business, especially in the fast-growing cyber-security business.

And they are always fighting the last war – solutions against the last attack, even as the threat moves on, he advises, and the channel will still be the first port of call for customers facing or suffering an actual attack. Having evaluated all the major players over the last twenty years, he says that distributors like Nuvias are in the best position to advise on what is needed, and who is likely to be around after a few years.